President Donald Trump is shifting systematically to tighten his grip on Democratic-leaning big cities — the geographic middle of resistance to his agenda — by undermining their autonomy and eroding their political power.
Those militant targets are the common thread that hyperlinks the high-profile initiatives Trump has launched in latest days to seize control of legislation enforcement in Washington, DC; strain purple states to attract new congressional district lines; and probably pursue an unprecedented “redo” of the 2020 census.
These new efforts compound the strain Trump is already putting on main cities with an agenda that features aggressive immigration enforcement; cuts in federal research funding to universities central to the financial system of many massive metros; and threats to rescind federal funding for jurisdictions that resist his calls for to impose conservative insurance policies on immigration, education, homelessness and policing.
Trump is pursuing this confrontational method at a time when main metropolitan areas have change into the undisputed engines of the nation’s financial development — and the nexus of analysis breakthroughs in applied sciences corresponding to synthetic intelligence, which Trump has identified as key to the nation’s competitiveness. The 100 largest metropolitan areas now account for about three-fourths of the nation’s financial output, in line with analysis by Brookings Metro, a center-left suppose tank. Yet Trump is treating the biggest cities much less as an financial asset to be nourished than as a political risk to be subdued.
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, mentioned Trump’s method to the nation’s largest cities is “colonial” in that he needs to learn from their prodigious financial output whereas suppressing their independence and political clout. This administration is “treating America’s great economic engines as weak and problematic colonial outposts,” Muro mentioned. “They view them as the problem, when (in reality) they are the absolute base of American competitiveness in the battle against China or whoever (else).”
Antagonism towards main cities has lengthy been central to Trump’s message. Several occasions he has described American cities with mayors who’re Democrats, members of racial minorities, or each, as dystopian “rodent-infested” “hellholes.” Trump in 2024 nonetheless ran better in most massive cities than in his earlier races, amid widespread disenchantment about then-President Joe Biden’s file on inflation, immigration and crime.
Still, as Trump himself has famous, massive cities, and sometimes their internal suburbs, stay the inspiration of Democratic political power and the cornerstone of opposition to his agenda. A collection of dramatic actions simply in the previous few days reveals how systematically Trump is shifting to debilitate these cities’ skill to oppose him.
The most seen means Trump is pressuring big cities is by deploying federal legislation enforcement and army personnel into them over the objections of native officers. In his first time period, Trump despatched federal legislation enforcement personnel into Portland, Oregon, and Washington, DC, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 homicide.
But after he left workplace, Trump, who doesn’t usually publicly second-guess himself, steadily mentioned that considered one of his biggest regrets was that he didn’t dispatch extra federal forces into cities. In his 2024 marketing campaign, he explicitly pledged to deploy the National Guard, and probably active-duty army, into main cities for a number of functions: combating crime, clearing homeless encampments and supporting his mass deportation program.
In workplace, Trump has steadily fulfilled these guarantees. When protests erupted in Los Angeles in June over an intense Immigration and Custom Enforcement deportation push, Trump deployed not only the National Guard (which he federalized over the objection of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom), but additionally active-duty Marines. Then, the administration used these forces not solely to protect federal buildings, but additionally to accompany ICE (and different businesses) on enforcement missions — together with a placing deployment of armored automobiles and soldiers in tactical gear to a public park in a closely Hispanic neighborhood.
The underlying immigration enforcement that precipitated the LA protests constituted a distinct present of drive. As a recent NCS investigation showed, ICE is relying way more on road apprehensions in cities in blue states than in purple states, the place it’s eradicating extra individuals from jails and prisons. The administration says that imbalance is a results of “sanctuary” insurance policies in blue states and cities limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. But civil rights teams see the administration’s confrontational blue-state method as an try and intimidate each native officers and immigrant communities. (The truth that ICE last week performed an immigration sweep immediately outdoors a Newsom press convention bolstered the latter interpretation.)
Whatever the rationale, analysis by the University of California at Merced suggests the administration’s enforcement method is hurting blue cities. Using census knowledge, the college’s Community and Labor Center lately found that from May to July the variety of California staff holding a private-sector job fell by about 750,000 — proportionally an excellent better decline than throughout the 2008 Great Recession. Hispanic individuals and Asian Americans accounted for nearly all of the falloff.
Sociology professor Ed Flores, the middle’s school director, mentioned he believes the decline is “absolutely” tied to financial disruption flowing from “the presence of ICE and the way that (people) are being apprehended” on the road.
New York City, too, has seen a notable drop in the labor force participation rate amongst Hispanic males.
Now, with the army (if not ICE) presence in LA winding down, Trump has despatched lots of of National Guard troops into Washington, DC, whereas additionally using a bit of federal legislation that permits him to quickly seize management of the town’s police division.
In his news conference last week asserting the DC strikes, Trump repeatedly mentioned he would complement the National Guard forces, as he did in LA, with active-duty troops if he deems it needed. And he repeatedly signaled that he’s contemplating deploying army forces into different cities that he described as overrun by crime, together with Chicago, New York, Baltimore and Oakland, California — all jurisdictions with Black mayors. “We’re not going to lose our cities over this, and this will go further,” Trump declared.
Most consultants agree that Trump will confront substantial authorized hurdles if he tries to duplicate the DC deployment in different locations. “What they are doing in DC is not repeatable elsewhere for a number of reasons,” mentioned Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the nationwide safety program on the Brennan Center for Justice.
Nunn mentioned Trump can order this mission due to the DC National Guard’s distinctive authorized standing. On the one hand, Nunn famous, the DC Guard is underneath the president’s direct management, fairly than the jurisdiction of a state governor. On the opposite, he mentioned, the Justice Department has dominated that even when the president makes use of the DC Guard, its actions qualify as a state, not federal, deployment. That’s important as a result of state guard deployments usually are not topic to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act’s ban on federal army forces partaking in home legislation enforcement.
If Trump tries to deploy the National Guard to handle crime in the big cities of blue states, corresponding to Chicago or New York, Nunn argued, he would face a catch-22. Since there’s nearly no probability Democratic governors would comply with take part, Trump may solely put troops on these streets by federalizing their states’ National Guard or utilizing active-duty army, Nunn mentioned. But, he added, “once they are working with federalized National Guard or active-duty military forces, the Posse Comitatus Act applies” — barring using these forces for home legislation enforcement.
Trump may search to override the Posse Comitatus Act’s ban on army involvement by invoking the Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act has not been used to fight road crime, however the statute allows the president to domestically deploy the army in opposition to “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”
Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who specializes in the relationships amongst completely different ranges of presidency, agreed that invoking the Insurrection Act to justify sending the National Guard into cities over mayors’ objections would shatter the widely understood limits on the legislation’s utility.
But he additionally believes that precedent offers no agency assurance that this Supreme Court, which has proved extremely receptive to Trump’s expansive claims of presidential authority, would cease him. Trump “could try” to win court docket approval of army deployments to battle crime by citing the Insurrection Act’s language about “‘domestic violence’ and ‘unlawful combinations’” after which claiming that’s “depriving the people of their right to security,” Briffault mentioned.
Whatever the authorized hurdles, extra broadly deploying the army on home missions would convey substantial penalties. Mayor Jerry Dyer of Fresno, California, who spent 18 years as the town’s police commissioner, says that placing army forces onto the streets of extra cities would create issues of coordination with native officers and belief with native communities. “Whenever you start sending federal resources into local jurisdictions and actually take over the policing of that jurisdiction, it can become very disturbing to that community and quite frankly can create some neighborhood issues and ultimately a lack of trust,” mentioned Dyer, who co-chairs the Mayors and Police Chiefs Task Force for the US Conference of Mayors.
Even extra profound stands out as the implications of numbing Americans to the sight of closely armored army forces routinely patrolling the streets of home cities — a picture that traditionally has been common solely in authoritarian nations. New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a number one scholar of authoritarian regimes, wrote last week that the final word intention of Trump’s home deployments “is to habituate Americans to see militarized cities and crackdowns against public dissent in cities as normal and justified.” Step by step, she argued, Trump is searching for “to disempower and delegitimize all Democratic municipal and state authorities.”
In much less apparent methods, the battle that has erupted over redistricting — and the probably battle approaching over the census — constitutes one other Trump-backed effort to “disempower” massive metropolitan areas.
The uncommon mid-decade congressional redistricting that Texas Republicans are pursuing at Trump’s behest would improve the variety of Republican-leaning US House seats largely by decreasing the variety of districts representing the state’s greatest metropolitan areas, together with Dallas, Houston and Austin, which all lean Democratic.
The new map would additional dilute the political affect of Texas’ main metro areas, at the same time as they’ve accounted for about four-fifths of the state’s inhabitants and financial development over latest years, mentioned Steven Pedigo, director of the LBJ Urban Lab on the University of Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.
“The growth in Texas has been driven by urban communities, but those communities are not going to be represented in these additional maps,” Pedigo mentioned.
In that means, the brand new Texas map extends the technique that Republicans there, and in different rising Sun Belt states, used in the maps they drew after the 2020 census, mentioned John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
States corresponding to Texas and Florida that added essentially the most House seats and electoral votes after the 2020 census — and are poised to achieve essentially the most once more after 2030 — are including inhabitants primarily amongst non-White individuals and in Democratic-leaning metro areas, Bisognano noted in a recent memo. Yet each of these teams will probably be denied the extra House illustration generated by that inhabitants development if the Republicans controlling Sun Belt state governments proceed to attract district traces that splinter metro populations and favor rural ones. “They are subjugating (metro voters) to produce a partisan outcome that is not reflective of the people of those cities,” Bisognano mentioned.
The calls from Trump and Vice President JD Vance to “redo” the 2020 census, partly to exclude undocumented immigrants, may marginalize cities much more.
Even if Trump may surmount the numerous authorized and logistical obstacles to conducting a mid-decade census, a reapportionment of House seats and electoral votes that excluded undocumented immigrants wouldn’t outcome in the shift of affect from blue to purple states that many conservatives envision. John Robert Warren, a University of Minnesota sociologist, concluded in a 2025 paper that if unauthorized immigrants have been excluded from the 2020 census, California and Texas would every lose a House seat and New York and Ohio would every acquire one. “It would make literally zero difference,” Warren mentioned. “If you assume Texas and Ohio go red and California and New York go blue, then it’s just a wash.”
Excluding undocumented immigrants from the depend, although, may supply Trump one other solution to squeeze city facilities. Many agricultural communities have substantial undocumented immigrant populations, however half of all undocumented immigrants dwell in simply 37 massive counties, in line with estimates by the Migration Policy Institute. “Within a state that Republicans control, by not including (undocumented people), it would be much easier to draw Republican districts because you would have a smaller minority population base to work with,” mentioned Jeffrey Wice, a redistricting professional at New York University’s legislation college. Not solely congressional illustration but additionally the numerous federal funding sources tied to inhabitants would shift towards rural areas if the census undercounts the city inhabitants, he famous.
Wice, who previously consulted for Democrats on redistricting, says blue states and cities can’t assume Trump received’t pursue any of those prospects, irrespective of how far-fetched they now appear. The identical is definitely true on the deployment of federal drive into blue locations. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently published an inner Department of Homeland Security memo that described the joint ICE-National Guard mission in Los Angeles as “the type of operations (and resistance) we’re going to be working through for years to come.” (Emphasis added.)
During World War II, the German siege of Leningrad famously lasted nearly 900 days. Big blue American cities could also be counting down the hours as anxiously for the 1252 days remaining in Trump’s second time period.